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How to use Apple’s new Media Manager

Apple has rolled out a new Media Manager that simplifies screenshot management in iTunes Connect. This is a long waited feature as managing screenshots has been a notoriously painful process for developers. New iTunes Connect Media Manager lets you prepare one set of screenshots and they will be automatically scaled down to appropriate sizes for smaller screens. But even more awesome is that this also works for localized screenshots. According to Apple, if your app is developed for iPhone, iPad and Watch you may end up having a total of 980 screenshots if your app is localized to all the supported languages. So this is a huge time-saver. Let’s take a look at how the new Media Manager is actually used:

You can find a small link to Media Manager right under the App Preview and Screenshots section:

When you have opened it, you can simply drag and drop your screenshots to each device family separately or click “Use 5.5-inch Display” check box to let Media Manager downscale the screenshots for you.

That is great and simplifies the process a lot! You can do this also for localized versions: simply prepare localized versions of your screenshots and then select the appropriate language in the top right corner. The process is the same for each language.

But how do I create the localized screenshots?

Unfortunately Media Manager is not doing this for you. It will simplify the submission process a lot, but you still have to deal with the actual localization yourself.

You have basically a couple of options: either take the actual screenshots of your localized application for each language or use Photoshop to create the screenshots. Most screenshots contain marketing and demo content so they are often created in Photoshop to represent the actual app. It’s also often easier to manage updates when you don’t have to take screenshots with each release cycle. Simply modify the few base screenshots that are then used for all the devices and languages.

To make it easier to produce localized versions of your screenshots, we have published a Photoshop plug-in called Get Localization for Photoshop. It exports the textual content from your PSD file into a resource file that can be uploaded to Get Localization Workspace or Go service. When you get the file back from us, you simply create the localized PSD versions automatically with the plug-in. We just recently introduced a new version that also supports Artboards.

So it looks like managing screenshots is getting easier over time – so don’t lose hope! You can always contact us for help, our Sales and Support team is eager to answer your questions. You can get professional translations from Get Localization – also for your other content like the actual app UI, website and other marketing materials.